A poem about the aftermath of a car bombing in Beirut has won the international Moth Poetry Prize.
Judge Ishion Hutchinson chose Adam Oliver’s poem Shazaya as the overall winner. The announcement was made at an award ceremony online last night. The prize, established in 2011, remains one of the most prestigious and lucrative in the world for a single unpublished poem. Oliver will receive €6,000 prize money, while his fellow shortlistees, Ronald Carson, Elena Croitoru-Reed and Juleus Ghunta, will each receive €1,000.
“Delineated in couplets that have a clipped, cinematic tension, Shazaya is about the harrowing moment and aftermath of a car bombing in Beirut,” Hutchinson said. ”The spare, impressionistic language heightens without poeticising the vivid, tragic reality of such state violence. Its unflinching, clear-eyed depiction of the irreparable severity of that violence on a single human - ‘stitching / him forever to that blast’ - cuts deep into those who can’t even articulate less imagine such violence, commonplace as it has become in our world.
“This stark intimate scope is one of the splendid achievements of Shazaya, how its caring, careful documentary accuracy underscores and voices the unbearable final elusiveness and bewilderment central not just to strong art but also to the act of witnessing.”
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Oliver is from west London and a graduate of Cambridge University’s masters programme in creative writing. He taught English for many years in England and Italy, and most recently was the headteacher of one of Turkey’s most prestigious schools, Robert College in Istanbul. He is currently caring for his mother and completing a collection of poems about her loss to Alzheimer’s disease, entitled Disappearing Act. Alongside poetry, he is working on a graphic novel and a non-fiction book about how to bring meaningful environmental sustainability into schools.
“I am absolutely thrilled,” he said, “and stunned in equal measure … This is such an honour, and my first feelings are of incredible gratitude to you at The Moth, and of course to Ishion."
